With Google Mobile Instant first spot is all that counts

December 14, 2010

Google has now rolled out it’s instant search mechanism to their mobile offering. You still have to select to activate the feature. While it’s early days, due to the small screen I’m struggling to find it any useful at all on my iPhone.

In an effort to locate a physical phone shop on my iPhone, I started to type in the words “orange”. With Google mobile instant activated, Google immediately delivered search results to the iPhone. The first result was unsurprisingly the official Orange sem advert. As I knew the street name of the shop in question I continued to fine tune my search. Again, the only result I could se through the instant delivery was the same Orange advert.

Not until I actually pressed the “search” button, did I see any more results. In this case the second result was precisely what I was looking for. While Google instant search for mobile had already delivered the results in the background, the instant feature was of little use as I simply couldn’t see more of the results than the first position PPC advert.

What does this mean for mobile PPC campaigns? As more people switch over to use Google instant i would expect the first position to start recieveing even more CTR.

Welcome. These are my thoughts on digital marketing in general, and search, social and affiliate in particular. It does not represent the views of my employer. I hope you enjoy and invite to connect with me.